Harnish on Sainsbury on Grice on Frege on compositionality

From:

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1183&context=eip

Section:

"Compositionality"

Harnish, reviewing Sainsbury's book, "Departing from Frege", notes:

"Sainsbury refers to "Frege's attachment to compositionality principles" while noting
that "compositionality for natural language is quite a difficult issue" (10)."

"It is made more difficult too if one runs compositionality together with reference failure or substitution ("... whatever the referent a whole sentence containing it is will also be lacking, a remark which reveals his commitment to the
compositionality of reference" (10-11)."

"Compositionality is perhaps the best explanation for reference failure (and substitution), but without additional premisses, reference failure does not entail it (see Pelletier, 2001)."

"Sainsbury is tempted to get compositionality by incorporating into Pare Down Fregeanism a modified Davisonian framework for

"a semantic description of a language ... to ... state and fix the meanings of
sentences" (6)."

"That framework is of course a moving target, and part of chapter [1] is devoted to
elaborating it."

"Given that framework's commitment to a language as a set of sentences, what Chomsky
(1986, 2000) calls 'E-language', it would have been interesting if Sainsbury had devoted some space to Chomsky's critique of that notion (see Stone and Davies, 2002)."

"But the variety of singular terms, as well as other views Frege holds about sense, should give pause here that a Fregean PDF really is dealing in
meaning."

"Recall that for Frege, entities in general have numerous senses, they are like characteristics."

"Some of these senses are expressed by pieces of language."

"Some senses expressed by pieces of language are not relative to the speaker, and are not relative to the occasion of utterance."

"Concerning these it is at least not misleading to say that they are "had" by the expression, and may approximate linguistic meaning."

"But even that leaves out force, which is an intuitive part of meaning."

"No one would say that

2 is an even prime.

and

Is 2 an even prime?

have the same (intuitive, linguistic) meaning."

"Frege (1892,
1918) held that force ('Kraft') is "contained" in sentences --in the above case one force is assertive and the other erotetic."

"When faced with force, Sainsbury advises us to "abstract from force by pretending that all utterances are sayings" (31)."

"Unfortunately, this does not abstract far enough to leave remnants of
force behind: contrast

He said that P.

with

He said that she is to do A

see Bach and Harnish 1979 chapter 2 for more discussion).

"None of this detracts from the Davidson framework, it just highlights the
degree that aligning PDF with that framework departs from Frege and Fregeanism."

"Another worry for PDF from this perspective is that if the above points about the variety of singular terms is generally right, then what will the

compositionally-determined sense

(and reference) of a single sentence containing this
variety amount to?"

"Recall, we get the senses of (pure) descriptions from the language, of proper names
from the (social) naming practice, and of indexicals-demonstratives from context."

"How would one state

compositionality principles

over these, and what would the "sense" of a sentence as an integrated whole
look like?"

"This is one danger of an eclectic notion of sense, one which "features in various issues like ... samesaying, in guaranteed sameness of reference, ... in counting items of knowledge, and in saying which characteristics are manifest" (10)"

"Frege took the hard line and postulated something to play all
theses roles, and that something, sense, could then compose appropriately. This resulted in an amazingly powerful, elegant (and, yes, sometimes weird) theory."

"One chips away at the occupier of such roles, leaving only the roles, at a price, and compositionality may reveal that the price is very high."